Rift with Washington uncoveres foreign policy crisis

CHINA'S Foreign Minister Qian Qichen was doing his best to put on a brave face.

In an article in the latest edition of Seeking Truth magazine, he stressed how successful China has been in breaching the sanctions imposed by Western nations after 1989.

To drive home the point, yesterday's domestic papers hailed the supposedly enormous success of China's foreign policy in Jamaica. In contrast, China's decision to withdraw its ambassador in Washington merited two lines in the People's Daily.

The truth is China's foreign policy is in another mess. Relations with the United States are at the worst level since 1989 if not 1979. Japan failed to satisfy China by making a full apology for its occupation but dared to challenge China's right to test nuclear weapons.

In Europe, premier Li Peng has been forced to drop his trip to Poland after parliamentarians in China's erstwhile brother communist state attacked his human rights record. At the same time Taiwan's Premier Lien Chan has set off for Austria and very likely, the Czech republic. To make matters worse, the Dalai Lama is also about to be received by Switzerland's President and visit Germany and Austria.

Nearer to home, Southeast Asian countries are showing every sign of preparing to unite against China, shaken by its aggressive and assertive stance on the Spratly Islands.

Even tiny Mongolia has dared shake its fist at China after accusing it of bugging its embassy in Beijing.

Qian Qichen's reaction has been to fall back on the old game of portraying China as a victim of Western bullying.

The world may find it pragmatic to normalise economic ties with China but the Tiananmen massacre, its growing power and its assertiveness make many uncomfortable.

In his article, Mr Qian criticised this 'international tendency to exaggerate China's strength' and said it was wrong to allege China will become the world's first or second economic power in the next 10 or 20 years.

Yet China is not a small island like Jamaica nor can it pose as a champion of third world and non-aligned states. It increasingly behaves like any other big power acting in its own narrow national interests. To the intense frustration of the Communist Party, countries are able to put pressure on Beijing by exploiting the rift between Beijing and Taipei or the Dalai Lama.

Small countries like Poland who know what it is like to be bullied by a big power inevitably sympathise with Lee Teng-hui or the Dalai Lama.

China's great fear is that now that the US has allowed President Lee to visit others will do the same.

For the moment though, China's response is to hang tough: to break off negotiations with Taiwan, withdraw its ambassador to Washington, abjure multilateral talks over the Spratlys and suspend talks with the Dalai Lama.

This reflects the ascendancy of conservative thinking since Tiananmen and which must have been encouraged by the feeble Western response to Russian nationalism.

After all, compared to Russian President Boris Yeltsin's brutal assault on Chechen separatists, China's response to Tibetan rebels and Taiwan's independence movement is quite civilised.

If President Bill Clinton can still hold summits with Mr Yeltsin why should Beijing, which behaves so much better, be treated this way? This sense of grievance, the feeling that China is being unfairly treated, is going to be dangerously inflamed by the growing split with Washington.

For the first time since 1979, neither country will now be represented at ambassadorial level after US ambassador Stapleton Roy left Beijing yesterday and Chinese ambassador Li Daoyu was recalled.

The great danger for the US is that China's communist leaders will now be happy to appeal to latent nationalist emotions and strengthen their grip on power.